Established in 1971, the Political Science Reviewer has served for more than a half century as a venue for political theory and philosophy that resists disciplinary dogmas and novelties. We endeavor to give voice to a range of scholars and to put these voices into traditional conversation with each other. Authors are encouraged to submit both articles and symposium ideas.
School of Economic Thought and Leadership
Editor's Note: Christian Political Thought
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This essay reclaims Mary Wollstonecraft as a deeply religious thinker whose defense of women’s rational capacity corrects modernity’s flawed, disembodied notion of reason and its damaging effects on views of women. Echoing Pope Benedict XVI’s critique of such rationality, I argue that the “masculine” reason often criticized by modern feminists is actually an erroneous conception of reason itself—one Wollstonecraft challenged more fundamentally than later feminists. Contrary to the common portrayal of Wollstonecraft as a secular Enlightenment radical, and building on my 2021 book The Rights of Women, I show she was a religiously inspired moral thinker. Her ideas rest on the biblical truth that women and men are equally rational beings made in God’s image, destined for eternal communion with Him. I trace depictions of women’s rationality from Christine de Pizan’s early fifteenth-century pre-Reformation defense through the errors of Catholic nominalism, Reformation voluntarism, and Enlightenment abstraction. Wollstonecraft used available intellectual resources to reject voluntarist views of divine, political, and patriarchal authority. Instead, she reclaimed a richer, authoritative reason grounded in theological anthropology, emphasizing moral formation and personal virtue. Her vision for women prioritizes virtuous self-governance, guided by good parents, teachers, and books. This integrates—albeit imperfectly—women’s rational capacities with their embodied duties, especially motherhood. Though theologically distinct from Benedict’s Catholic synthesis of faith and reason, body and soul, Wollstonecraft’s virtue-centered framework corrects modern feminism’s liberal-autonomy models. It affirms women’s full humanity and rationality, honors embodied sexual difference, and elevates the private and public value of caregiving.
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Harvey C. Mansfield's Machiavelli's Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World
Did Alexander Hamilton Adopt the New “Political Science” Proposed by Charles de Montesquieu and David Hume?
Alexander Hamilton is frequently labeled an Enlightenment figure influenced primarily by David Hume and Charles de Montesquieu. This paper contends that his political thought remained firmly rooted in the Aristotelian-Ciceronian-Christian tradition. Hamilton rejected the modern “new political science” that sought to secure liberty and welfare through institutional mechanisms alone, without virtuous rulers. Though engaging Montesquieu’s separation of powers, he and Madison advocated only a flexible, partial blending consistent with the classical mixed regime. Against Hume’s view of men as knaves whose passions must be mechanically balanced in a self-regulating system, Hamilton insisted reason must govern passions, virtue is indispensable, and government exists to constrain passions toward reason and justice. The end of politics, for Hamilton, was the common good—the safety and non-hedonistic happiness of the people—with justice and virtue as central aims. Law was an ordinance of reason, not will; judges applied objective natural law, and the Constitution itself was fundamental law binding even majorities. Hamilton’s framework thus reveals profound continuity with classical and Christian sources rather than the modern philosophic innovations of Hume and Montesquieu.
Scholars have gestured at the importance of the Augustinian dimension to Thomas More’s Utopia (De optimo reipublicae, 1516)since the early biographers of Thomas More recounted his renowned set of lectures on Augustine’s City of God (De civitate Dei) in the St. Lawrence parish church in London. This article works through the textual resonances in each text looking precisely at superbia to demonstrate how Thomas More engages in the project of educating the reader’s political imagination. The psychagogic effects of Utopia demonstrate More’s participation in an Augustinian tradition where politics plays a key role in securing temporal peace and ameliorating the politically vicious effects of pride. By pushing on the Augustinian dimension of Thomas More’s Utopia rooted in the tempering of political pride, one can affirm the satirical elements of the dialogue and its serious political proposals.
Wilson Carey McWilliam's The Idea of Fraternity in America at 50
A symposium on Wilson Carey McWilliam's The Idea of Fraternity in America
Prudence, according to Aristotle, is the “only virtue peculiar to the ruler,” and receives substantial attention in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. Despite this attention, prudence is hard to define and even more difficult to explain in practice. Aristotle offers a similarly enigmatic presentation of the purpose of Book VI: identifying the principles of correct reason. He makes few direct statements about these principles or their relation to the intellect’s capacities. I argue that both presentations are deliberately opaque to caution against straightforward conceptions of realizing the intellect’s purpose—to discern truth. This caution highlights the opacity of prudence and its dependence upon excellences it cannot itself supply, including examined experience and the capacity to discover the correct principles of action.
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This essay examines the role of collective memory in the political theologies of two important American thinkers: Mercy Otis Warren and Abraham Lincoln. Warren, a founding-era Anti-Federalist, wrote one of the first authoritative accounts of the American Revolution in an effort to preserve a collective memory of the Founding, which for her was intertwined with covenantal Christianity. Warren is an important forerunner to Lincoln, whose construction of the collective memory of the Founding (modeled on the ancient Hebrews) set the stage for understanding the present and future of American politics. The essay concludes with a comparison of Warren’s and Lincoln’s accounts of American collective memory and affirms the necessity of these memories in the establishment of civil religion for both thinkers.
The (Catholic?) Soul of the (American) Republic
In Politics III, Aristotle famously argues a point common in ancient accounts of democracies and republics, namely, that “no man can practice virtue who is living the life of a mechanic or laborer.” Cicero, not wholly sharing Aristotle’s view, nevertheless likewise relegates this portion of the population to a secondary role. Modern republics, on the other hand, seem to be animated by a kind of universal call to republican virtue and office, such that early American statesman Charles Carroll observed in 1828 that the “protracted existence” of the American republic depended on the “morality, sobriety, and industry of the people, and on no part more than on the mechanics, forming in our cities the greatest number of their most useful inhabitants.” The well-educated Carroll knew the arguments of the ancients, but his thinking rested on an insight they did not possess: the Christian and Catholic intellectual tradition, which presents a fundamental alteration to the older understanding. While he was no “Christian nationalist,” this paper will argue that Carroll’s Catholicism was crucial to his understanding of republicanism.
Moses, Machiavelli, and Augustine's Republicanism
This article explores The City of God’s treatment of Moses, the biblical founder of the Hebrew republic. Moses, we maintain, is for Augustine an exemplar of the “model statesman.” Two sets of contrasts discussed here draw out the significance of Augustine’s treatment of Moses. First is Augustine’s comparison of Moses with Lycurgus, the mythical refounder of Sparta. Second is a comparison of Augustine’s analysis of these figures with Machiavelli’s. Augustine’s Moses emerges from these contrasts as an exemplar of republicanism, defined by honesty, publicity, and humility and as such may still speak to political theorists today.
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Alasdair MacIntyre, the Concept of Tradition, and the Catholic University
This paper considers Alasdair MacIntyre’s explication of three rival versions of moral enquiry—encyclopedia, genealogy, and tradition—as a framework for thinking about the modern Catholic university. In applying MacIntyre’s analysis to the contemporary situation, the paper argues that “tradition hires” rather than “mission hires” are required to maintain the identity of an authentically Catholic university. At the same time, the paper contends that those faculty who practice moral enquiry in the mode of encyclopedia or genealogy nonetheless contribute to a thriving university. Finally, the paper draws on the theologian, Yves Congar, to argue that a plurality of traditions exist within the Catholic intellectual tradition.
Augustine and Political Friendship as Metaxy
This article examines Augustine’s concept of political friendship as a counterpoint to liberalism’s reliance on self-interest to achieve political harmony, a premise increasingly doubted for failing to foster civic virtue. Using Eric Voegelin’s notion of metaxy—the “in-between” realm of human existence—it portrays Augustine’s commonwealth as a space where the city of God (love of God) and the earthly city (love of self) converge. Augustine defines a people as rational beings bound by common objects of love, contrasting with liberalism’s distorted Augustinian roots, evident in thinkers like Pascal and Locke. Political friendship, infused with Ciceronian ideas and eschatological depth, balances justice and power through prudent choices. This metaxic commonwealth, both divine and deficient, offers a unique ontological status. Amid liberalism’s crisis, Augustine’s vision—prioritizing justice over power and likening community to a joyful, improvisational "jubilus"—presents a compelling alternative for nurturing political friendship in contemporary society.
Rival Revivals of Aquinas’s Tyrannicide Doctrine
The early-modern resistance theories developed by Juan de Mariana, S.J. (1536-1624) and Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548-1617), are less novel, and more consistent with Thomas Aquinas’s framework for tyrannicide in the De regno (c. 1267) than leading intellectual historians allow. This article makes the case that Mariana and Suárez clarify, refine, and develop Aquinas’s highly permissive and substantially vague writings on tyrannicide in rival ways. It demonstrates how medieval and ultimately Roman considerations of tyranny and tyrannicide remain present to the seventeenth-century thinkers who define so many modern ideas about rights of revolution, sovereignty, and the relationship between Church and state.
“Parchment Barriers” versus Separation of Functions
This article contends that the burgeoning literature advancing the thesis that the Constitution's separation of powers is a separation of functions enables us to understand more fully the critique of The Federalist against the first state constitutions. The first state constitutions, I argue, differ from the Constitution insofar as the former rely on "parchment barriers" that require both legislators to exercise a virtuous self-restraint and the people to have a watchful spirit while the latter depends on popular self-restraint in deference to the political process. The theoretical reason for this difference between the first state constitutions and the Constitution lies in the fact that whereas the first state constitutions were designed primarily with the end in view of preventing governmental tyranny, the Constitution is designed both to prevent governmental tyranny and ensure effective government.
Xenophon's Political Realism: The Opening of the Cyropaedia
Readers of The Education of Cyrus have long pondered its basic message. In this essay, I argue for the centrality of the first chapter of the work to our understanding of the work as a whole. There, Xenophon indicates that he was led to the study of Cyrus by idealistic hopes engendered by the awe he felt at Cyrus’s accomplishments. Once he had come to understand certain key aspects of Cyrus’s rule, Xenophon ceased to be gripped by those hopes. In this way, the introductory chapter of the Cyropaedia anticipates and encapsulates key teachings of the work as a whole, both about the true character of Cyrus’s excellence at ruling and about Xenophon’s interest in Cyrus. The chapter provides substantial evidence for a realist reading of the Cyropaedia as a corrective to idealistic hopes, particularly the hope that knowledge, if joined with political power, could solve all the problems of political life.
Using René Girard’s mimetic theory, this article breaks new and important ground in the scholarly treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s award-winning All the King’s Men. The novel depicts a society in the midst of a major political and social crisis. Anger, envy, resentment, and corruption are widespread. For Girard, such a crisis almost always culminates in an act of spectacular community violence—a scapegoating event—that brings peace and renews order. This is exactly how the novel concludes. By intuiting (if not consciously understanding) the relationship between mimetic conflict and violence, the novel illustrates what Girard sees as the “satanic” foundation of political and social order as such. This article not only sheds new light on the novel. It also demonstrates the value of Girard’s mimetic theory for research in the areas of American literature and political theory.
René Girard, mimetic theory, scapegoat, Satan, Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
This article explores the (qualified) Peronism of the Argentinian pope, his tendency to redefine Catholic thought in a broadly humanitarian and progressivist direction, and his questionable advocacy of enhanced Christian-Communist collaboration. By confusing compassion with charity, pacifism with peace, and the universality of the Christian religion with the effacement of national distinctions, Francis has weakened the Catholic Church's long-time refusal to identify freedom, justice, and peace with “ideological dreaming.” Special attention is paid to the pope's largely "humanitarian" reading of the Parable of the Good Samaritan in his 2020 encyclical Fratelli tutti.
Stephanie Shonekan and Adam Seagrave's Race and the American Story
The First Conservative Accommodation of the New Deal
Today thinkers associated with religiously informed “New Right” or “common good” conservatism have affirmed the New Deal, urging protection for workers and the poor and the political counterbalancing of wealthy and powerful elites. And yet they have often done so while also rejecting or seeking to somehow displace the Constitution. This development makes it appropriate to reconsider two of the first conservatives to accept the New Deal, Francis Graham Wilson (1901–1976) and Peter Viereck (1916–2006). Their conservatism was rooted in religious conviction and an evolutionary conception of politics and constitutional change that appealed to moderation, balance, and compromise. This article explicates their intellectual accommodation with the New Deal and then shows briefly how the administration of Dwight Eisenhower proceeded practically along quite similar lines. Today’s conservative reconciliation with the New Deal should revisit how these earlier conservatives managed to do so while also affirming the Constitution.
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Notes on Contributors Political Science Reviewer 48(1) 2024
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Relativism and Revelation in Plato's Cratylus
This study, focusing on the figure of Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus and Socrates’s allusions to Euthyphro and to divine inspiration, argues that the dialogue discloses a strange kinship between “perspectivism” or “relativism,” on one hand, and “revelation” or “decisionism,” on the other. It finds that Socrates concedes surprisingly significant ground to those positions. And, finally, it gives a view of Socrates’s dialectical response in light of that ground he is forced to concede.
Atlantic Revolutions, Constitutionalism, and Liberalism During the Spanish-American Independence Movements
This article is a historiographic analysis and critique of the central aspects of the study of the Spanish-American independence movements, specifically, its framing within the Atlantic Revolutions, the constitutional explosion during the second decade of the 19th century, and the role that liberalism played, not only in the Spanish-American context, but also the Spanish liberal revolution (1810-1814) and the Cádiz Constitution of 1812. The main thesis of the article is that the revoluciones hispánicas that took place in the Spanish-speaking world between 1808 and 1824 were clearly different from other revolutionary movements and made an original contribution to the Age of Revolutions, all of which tends to be minimized when considered as the last of the “great” Atlantic Revolutions (that of the Thirteen Colonies, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution).
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